I am thinking of building a forum/message board with Perl using DBM. This is for a big class project which I am allowed to choose what to do.

I am just wondering if this is a very good idea or not because I dont know if Perl and DBM would be good for that sort of thing. If not, what approach would be better.

I would consider myself a strong beginner with Perl. I know about basic file processing, arrays and hashes, DBM, and form processing. I know I could make a functional website with a very basic type of forum. I would like to shoot a little bigger though. However, I was thinking last night that a forum is meant to have many users and this means that many people could be accessing the same data and databases at the same time, so I am unsure how to handle that to avoid overwriting data and other problems I have not yet conceived.

If it's for a class project, then Perl and DBM is just as good as any other choice. The read-modify-write problem is not simple to solve and is probably why you were assigned the project.

If you want a real forum, I suggest you find some open-source software (hopefully in Perl) and modify it to fit your needs. Most have been around for years, that means, they're thoroughly debugged and solve problems you're not even aware of yet.

no, I was just assigned the task of making any project up that I could think of. My idea is to make a forum.

Actually the read modify write problem doesnt seem that hard now. Basically every user can have their own files and when something is ready to be written to a single webpage, it can be appended to the page and who ever writes to it first has their post put up first. I just need mutliple databases and then a central database. It will take a lot of work I know.